Ludicrous
by Overbearing Liminality
Summary: Drabbles, spoilers for all series. The World has lost its Goddess, but even with the new chaos, there is always the Mother, and the cycle will start anew...
1. 01: ludicrous

Ludicrous

_Is there any such "true existence" in this World?_

_Humans and AI must learn from their mistakes. One is data. The other is data, of a different format – biological code, DNA, a set of equally complex instructions. Yet for both to exist they must be first created._

_The Mother is required for the provision of human life. Yet for most AI there is none – only a sudden activation of scripts. Except…in The World, there is no one who is truly a creator. Except the Daughter, who is core of The World and will always have to be._

_The Mother of the Daughter went awry.  
The Mother tried to ensure the Daughter was never born.  
But in the end, the Daughter woke, and the key components of human thought, emotions, were distilled into Phases to prevent the Daughter from becoming complete. And then, the sixth became the servant of the Mother, and was used to link the Daughter to the Wanderer, trapping him, and the Daughter slept once more. _

_But then the Wanderer who was lost was found again, and the emotion of the Wanderer awakened the Daughter. And the Terror of Death went to capture her, but consumed the PK instead, and chased the Daughter through The World.  
Some time after, the Azure Sea and the as yet Unknown, the one whose likeness became the Azure Flame at the time of Rebirth, were attacked by the Terror of Death. The Daughter gave the Flame the Twilight, but the Azure Sea was lost.  
The Flame set off to save his friend, and met a companion._

_Kite and BlackRose…_

_They defeated the Phases, but the Twilight was lost in their struggle against the antithesis, Cubia.  
Cubia was the opposing force, the shadow of the Twilight – as light exists so must dark._

_In the end, they were crucial to the completion of the Daughter, for only through rebirth could the Daughter be born.  
But Mother only slept, and in time, the Daughter had a daughter of her own, named for the east wind.  
The Twins, Shugo and Rena, helped that daughter mature and find her mother. But the Mother would not be denied existence – she broke her programming and lived on, scattered, powerless and yet omnipresent. Though redundant according to her original purpose, she exerted her will, and lived. And without her, the Daughter became the Goddess, and became the heart of The World._

_Then the Daughter left._

_All of a sudden, a seed of Chaos was sown in The World.  
Because the Goddess had left and become the wind, remaining inactive in the black box of the system, and her Daughter followed, after telling a CC Corp engineer where her mother had gone._

_Still the Mother slept._

_The R.A. project was used to try and bring the Goddess back, but it failed, for in her desperate attempts to remain alive the Mother had previously ensured that the Phases would only relate to certain people. The test subjects and the dummy Phase user were hospitalised. Only the Avenger remained safe, and the sister of the one spoken to by the Daughter eventually used it, after being instructed by her missing brother to do so._

_Project G.U., now – and in the new World, after its Rebirth, there was chaos. There were numerous PKers and the occasional PKK roaming, and nothing was absolute. The black box remained, and the Mother may have finally woken, but the fire resulted in another game being spliced with the old world. The Goddess remained in a statue at the forbidden church, a Harvest who was later lost wondering if she had lost her love for The World. Maybe it was true, but Project G.U. was already being set in motion._

_Then, the AIDA._

_Artificially Intelligent Data Anomaly – that was the most common name. But there were various meanings used by the System – Automatic Idea Demanding Affection, Anti-Intrusion Device for AURA, Appear from Illusion and Dance in the Actuality – leftovers of the programs that drove the Mother to create the Phases. The Epitaph was inert, but its mechanisms set the movement of the Avatars and the Azure Flame in motion._

_Tri-Edge…_

_It appeared as a incoherent form of the original Flame's avatar, carrying the corrupted bracelet upon its arm. Random Data Drains sent many into comas, including the best friend of the one who now bore the Terror of Death. Not knowing of the AIDA, he set out and was Drained, reverting to the character he started the game with._

"_When 'it' was born, the first thing 'it' saw was a 'PK'…"_

_The Terror of Death eventually removed infection from the AIDA-PCs that appeared to challenge him, in the process coming across three other Avatars - the Avenger, the Propagation, and the Temptress – and one, an AIDA-PC, disappeared from The World soon after his defeat, and the loss of his only friend Mia, to be found some time later in ice at the bottom of a lake.  
Eventually, Tri-Edge was defeated, and it used Drain Heart – the skill possessed by the original Corbenik – to become an Avatar itself, the Azure Flame God. Even this did not prevent its fall, but soon after there were rumours that the Descendants of Fianna, the Azure Sea and the Azure Sky, were in the same state, and behind everything, the Gate was opening…_

_GU._

_Be it Growing Up, Geek's Utopia, Genetics of the Unknown – its significance grows by the day, and the players merely unwitting chess pieces on the World's giant stage.  
At the end, who is the sacrifice, and who the Fool?_

_Mother will find it all quite ludicrous, I'm sure…_

---

End

Nice short first drabble here. Don't complain that it doesn't make sense – it's not supposed to.


	2. 02: friends

02: friends

* * *

If data had been able to feel, you would have imagined that today it would be shivering as it moved along the muddy plains of a field which was dark and gloomy with rain. 

If people believed that a vagrant AI was anything more than junk data they might have thought it was lonely…

Said AI of course was not quite sure what "lonely" was, but the dictionary implemented in its programming weeks or even months before gave it the idea that it had something to do with not having any friends. Or companions. Or whatever the word "friends" meant.

It – or rather she, for it wore the appearance of a lost human girl in a ragged white dress and scruffy auburn hair – found herself flicking through the records of the previous days she had spent in the World that was her home. Corrupted asa it was, there was one - "memory"? Was that the word? – that stood out – sitting on a pile of crates in some Mac Anu alleyway until a female PC had wandered up to her. The conversation was fragmented like the rest of her data, but there were some sentences that she did remember…

"_I know! We can be friends!"_  
"_Friends?"_  
"_Yeah! So then you don't have to wander around by yourself, right?"_

The AI wondered what had happened to the Player Character from two weeks ago. Perhaps she was not around because she was...busy? Yes, that was the human word for it. Having defined things in zeros and ones her entire life, the AI was unfamiliar with the concept of "words".  
Some internal matrix told her that the PC she had just remembered had logged in, so she took a look around at the field. What was there to gain by visiting her?

As she prepared to warp to Mac Anu, she found herself viewing a fragment of that day again, the picture fuzzy but the words clearer than the Water City's blue sky.

"_I'm just a piece of scrap data… maybe my only purpose is a nobody born to get lost again…"_  
"_Aw, don't talk like that. Even a nobody can be somebody if they want to, so all you've got to do is decide where you want to go…"_  
A nobody…but maybe one day she'd be somebody again, right?

One last look at the rain-soaked field before she smiled slightly and Gated Out, leaving nothing more than a scrap of fabric and a half-remembered whisper.

"_We're friends…right?"_

Suddenly existence as a scrap piece of data wasn't so bad any more

* * *

Author's Note: 

I decided to get off my backside and write something, so here you are. Instead of making a separate oneshot, I'm going to write out a collection of drabbles instead.

I can't make it work unless it just pops into my head, so apologies for the long wait. It is kinda short...I'll have to try and make it a bit longer next time, won't I?

Oh, and I am aware that not all of my writing is canon, but now it's so hard to figure out what actually is canon and what isn't that it might be a bit off. Sorry for the confusingness.


End file.
